Christos Tsakas

Biography

Christos Tsakas is a historian and a Carlsberg fellow at the Danish Institute at Athens. His main fields of interest are European integration, authoritarian studies and business history. Tsakas holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Crete. Before moving to Athens, he held postdoctoral positions in Berlin, Florence, and Princeton. Ηe is currently a member of the advisory board for the project “Online Compendium der deutsch–griechischen Verflechtungen,” a collaboration between Free University Berlin and University of Athens.

At CES, Tsakas will explore the European integration dynamics from a business history perspective through a comparative analysis of the first and the second enlargement of the European Community (EC). The specific focus of the study is West German attitudes towards the Greek, Danish and abortive Norwegian applications in the 1960s and 1970s. The project, by addressing direct and indirect business interactions, will examine both their impact on the respective European policies of each country and their potential bearing on the EC level.

As an external researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH in Rethymno, Tsakas initiated an archives and oral history project, documenting postwar Greek industrialization. His articles have appeared in Business History, European Review of History and Historica. He is currently completing a book on German–Greek relations in the context of European integration.

This information is accurate for the time period that the visiting scholar is affiliated with CES.

Affiliations

Carlsberg Postdoctoral Fellow, Danish Institute at Athens

Visiting Scholar 2019-2020, CES, Harvard University

Research Project

The quest for enlargement: Business interactions and core–periphery relations in European integration